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just two weeks after an audit by the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction found inadequate oversight of unauthorized contracts and a loss of $9 billion in Iraqi funds, a witness told Democrats on Capitol Hill said key decisions by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq enabled contractors to bilk billions in reconstruction funds.

Monsanto's announcement of their plans to purchase Seminis, the largest fruit and vegetable seed producer in the world, was quickly followed by a statement that Monsanto does not intend to apply biotech to develop these seeds - at least not yet. This is a curious assertion from a dominant biotech company.

America and its key ally Saudi Arabia are being accused of quietly seeking to muzzle al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station that has often incurred Washington's ire for its coverage of Iraq and President George Bush's "war on terror".

U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.

Former associates say Ryan Manelick had told Army investigators looking into a fellow contractor's disappearance that large sums of money were being paid in kickbacks to a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in return for doling out lucrative contracts. Two months later Ryan Manelick was shot dead.

The Army Corps has set aside as much as $1.47 billion for explosives-demolition contracts with 10 private companies. Neither Zapata Engineering nor the Army Corps of Engineers would reveal exact salaries, but the first one-year contract the company received in September 2003 totaled $3.8 million for five management positions in Iraq.

Despite extensive media coverage of the kidnappings, beheadings and suicide attacks on civilian workers, one in ten applicants for jobs with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, remain willing to take those well-paying truck driver, food service, laundry and maintenance positions in Iraq.

The U.N. oil-for-food program chief under scrutiny for alleged corruption and mismanagement blocked a proposed audit of his office around the same time he's accused of soliciting lucrative oil deals from Iraq, according to investigators.

With South African mercenaries having shown up in civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, Ivory Coast, Papua New Guinea, and, now being active in Iraq, South Africa will review tough new laws to try to dissuade citizens from becoming embroiled in war zones.

Nearly 40% of start-ups in a new USA TODAY study employ engineers, marketers, analysts and others in jobs created in India and other nations. The study found that many U.S. start-ups, speeding the pace of globalization, now bypass the USA for nations where customers and cheap labor are plentiful.